Yikes ... what a number ... but surely bats are not the biggest airborne creatures? Ah well i do not know ... but yes truly the elemental forces would be the strongest - i havent had any experience with the Elementals in gaming ... hence my missing them out in my original numbers. Kudos!

It's the equating physical creature mass to elemental forces which doesn't work for me. Maybe another way to analogise (is that even a word?) would be to look at sacred sites in the known world Stone Henge is rocks imbued with power through belief, there are sacred trees, holy rivers, incense... are these possible starting points for elementals? Alternatively, if you wanted them to be rarer (I don't imagine all water is perpetually active 'elementals') you could look at natural disasters. Each one the work of an elemental force. How many elementals would it take to erupt Vesuvius or cause a tsunami?

Fimm McCool wrote:It's the equating physical creature mass to elemental forces which doesn't work for me. Maybe another way to analogise (is that even a word?) would be to look at sacred sites in the known world Stone Henge is rocks imbued with power through belief, there are sacred trees, holy rivers, incense... are these possible starting points for elementals? Alternatively, if you wanted them to be rarer (I don't imagine all water is perpetually active 'elementals') you could look at natural disasters. Each one the work of an elemental force. How many elementals would it take to erupt Vesuvius or cause a tsunami?

New age hippy nonsense and primitivist anthropomorphology of natural forces feels less like Warhammer than Renaissance Alchemical pseudo-scientific nonsense does to me. Can't think of any Earth Mysteries references in WFB2E at all, which is surprising seeing the alternative-history bent of the world and Ricks archeology background. Maybe in WFRP? But yeah! go for it!

In my Warhammerland, Elementals have to be summoned, they're not independent entities, so whilst their might be billions of them in posse they (like necromancers and demonologists) would realistically be capped by the number of people able to summon them.

Like with Elementals and Undead, I htink the number of demons would be dependant on how many wizards were able to summon them.

For the Old World we could use an estimate of the number of witch persecutions during "The Burning Times", being the witch burning craze of early-modern Europe. Rabid Neo-pagan Feminist Wiccans ludicrously claim the figure of witches killed at 9mil. Less rabid historians say around 40,000, over a 50 year period. Who knows? Let’s say that these are most Level 1 Witches, with 20,000 per generation. Then we could assume witches organise themselves in covens of 13 headed by a Demon, which gives us 1538 demons and 18462 Mastery Level One witches. Of course some of those “Demons” might just be Slaneeshi Beastmen pretending to be a demon, so let’s put aside 206 of them as beastcults, giving us 1332 And then some covens are going to be actual demonic cults, and the others just minor chaos tainted weirdos, misguided black metallers and some genuine earth-goddess cultists or what-have-you. So let’s split that into two which gives us 666 demons. Perfect.

Now we have 666 lesser demons (witches only being level 1 can’t summon anything else) which are 32pv. 21312PVWe also have 18462 LVL.1 Wizards (witches) 160pv 2953920And 206 Beastmen at 10pts each 2060pv

If I understood correctly you seem to be equating demonologist with pagans and elementalists with occultists. I would suggest it is the other way round if anything. Alternatively, i would say that all wizards in the old world are some kind of occultists. Someone analogous to a pagan would be an ork shaman?

Problem with using witchburning statistics is that (apart from the tendency of modern feminists to distort statistics as you mentioned), that those witchburnings were likely more to do with magical thinking on the part of the witchhunters than the alleged witches.

Definitely looking at Warhammer as Dennis Weatley, Hammer Horror kind of re-envisioning Early Modern Witch Craze. The historical evidence for Witch cults of 13 members is basically none, but If we use pseudo-historical Witch-Cult hypothesis as our fictional framework, rather than looking at the real causes of the phenomenon (which as you say, comes from the persecutors, not the persecuted), but base the numbers on more conservative estimates, I think we have something that feels Warhammerish, witches in isolated cults in the villages and forests, rather than a wide-spread peace-loving continental-wide pagan nature religion.

For the more educated Empire Demonologist, (remembering witches are only level 1) they too draw from the same as the Elementalists and Necromancers -the Renaissance Occultists. John Dee for example, summoned the dead (necromancy), did alchemical works (elementalism), and talked to 'angels' (demons of law - demonology). But I think all of that is basically dependant on the Renaissance University model and the societal structures required to maintain such, then dividing that into the (ahem) Colleges of Magic. Low level witches and their demons are outside and additional to that - but also summoning demons on a more regular (every full moon or every quarter) basis, so possibly a bigger impact on the overall PV of the demons.

Not even started on the Dark Elf / Melnibonian schools of sorcery, which I think are more likely to be dynastic in principle.

Pagans for Orc shamans? Perhaps. Or If we accept the conceit Orcs are fungoid - maybe the % of 'magic' in a 'magic' mushroom? Some data here.

I've been trying to find some data on shamanic populations in pre-colombian south american cultures, or zulus, for the Pygmies, but haven't come up with much.